CD and DVD

Different programs exist to burn CD/DVD's:

k3b is fully developed but not bloated. It handles well linux specific things as links and others.

Gnome comes with brasero, that works fine just for simple cases but if it gets complicated, the CD or DVD might end up in the trash.

Such programs are more or less just GUI's for the different CD/DVD packages. But it is also a challange to deal with those packages to get a satisfied result.

For USB burners check that USB SCSI support is enabled in the kernel.

Good practice is:

  1. always check the ISO image against its published checksum, in the advanced option there is a do not eject after write that should be selected to not confuse the computer (Hal and Dbus).

  2. verify written data (Hint: If you run into checksum problems, verify your RAM settings in the BIOS. However it can also be the fact, that the CD filesystem can not hold all the info coming from the hard disk filesystem)

  3. better use rewritable medium than produce trash

To observe the CD drives type wodim --scanbus and wodim --devices to get the real /dev file. Then run the diagnostic as readom dev=/dev/<the disc drive>. Very interesting is the scan for C2 errors. C2 errors can usually be corrected until a certain limit. If you have C2 errors you might consider to copy your data to a new fresh CD, before the data is unrepairable and lost.

LightScribe can write a human readable label on the disc. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/LightScribe


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